HBR Emotional Intelligence Boxed Set (6 Books) (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series) by Harvard Business Review

Author:Harvard Business Review
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2017-01-31T15:52:38+00:00

3

The Science

Behind the Smile

An interview with Daniel Gilbert by Gardiner Morse

25

Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert is widely known for his 2006 best seller, Stumbling on Happiness. His work reveals, among other things, the systematic mistakes we all make in

imagining how happy (or miserable) we’ll be. In this

edited interview with HBR’s Gardiner Morse, Gilbert

surveys the fi eld of happiness research and explores its frontiers.

HBR: Happiness research has become a hot topic in the past 20 years. Why?

Gilbert: It’s only recently that we realized we could marry one of our oldest questions—“What

27

Happiness

is the nature of human happiness?”—to our new-

est way of getting answers: science. Until just a few decades ago, the problem of happiness was mainly

in the hands of philosophers and poets.

Psychologists have always been interested in

emotion, but in the past two decades the study of

emotion has exploded, and one of the emotions

that psychologists have studied most intensively

is happiness. Recently economists and neurosci-

entists joined the party. All these disciplines have

distinct but intersecting interests: Psychologists

want to understand what people feel, economists

want to know what people value, and neuroscien-

tists want to know how people’s brains respond to

rewards. Having three separate disciplines all in-

terested in a single topic has put that topic on the

scientifi c map. Papers on happiness are published

in Science, people who study happiness win Nobel prizes, and governments all over the world are

rushing to fi gure out how to measure and increase

the happiness of their citizens.

28

The Science Behind the Smile

How is it possible to measure something as subjective as happiness?

Measuring subjective experiences is a lot easier

than you think. It’s what your eye doctor does

when she fi ts you for glasses. She puts a lens in

front of your eye and asks you to report your ex-

perience, and then she puts another lens up, and

then another. She uses your reports as data, sub-

mits the data to scientifi c analysis, and designs a

lens that will give you perfect vision—all on the

basis of your reports of your subjective experience.

People’s real-time reports are very good approxi-

mations of their experiences, and they make it

possible for us to see the world through their eyes.

People may not be able to tell us how happy they

were yesterday or how happy they will be tomor-

row, but they can tell us how they’re feeling at the moment we ask them. “How are you?” may be the

world’s most frequently asked question, and no-

body’s stumped by it.

29

Happiness

There are many ways to measure happiness. We

can ask people “How happy are you right now?”

and have them rate it on a scale. We can use mag-

netic resonance imaging to measure cerebral blood

fl ow, or electromyography to measure the activity

of the “smile muscles” in the face. But in most cir-

cumstances those measures are highly correlated,

and you’d have to be the federal government to

prefer the complicated, expensive measures over

the simple, inexpensive one.

But isn’t the scale itself subjective? Your fi ve might be my six.

Imagine that a drugstore sold a bunch of cheap

thermometers that weren’t very well calibrated.

People with normal temperatures might get read-

ings other than 98.6, and two people with the same

temperature might get different readings.

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